GREEK LOVE IN FAR EASTERN SIBERIA

The only indigenous Siberian peoples that remained unconquered by Russia until the eighteenth century were those living in the easternmost Chukchi Peninsular and the nearby Kamchatkan Peninsular. By the mid twentieth century, their cultures had been severely eroded by Russian interference, but in the meantime their customs had been recorded by some of the first European explorers to meet them. Amongst at least two of these peoples, the customs recorded included widespread Greek love.

Remarkably more is known about the customs, including sexual customs of the peoples who lived around the Bering Straits than of those who lived inland. One explanation is that the explorers who came across them came by ship, which afforded much more leisure time for writing.

The Itelmens

Georg Wilhelm Steller (1709-46) was a German naturalist who took part in this expedition. His Beschreibung von dem Lande Kamschatka (Description of Kamchatka) was posthumously published in Frankfurt and Leipzig in 1774, pp. 350-1.

As the Itelmen promiscuously make love and give birth in their dwellings and before the eyes of their children, the children learn the handiwork of Venusian trade at an early age and try to imitate their parents. When they succeed, the parents boast of the children’s cleverness. But when the boys ravished each other per anam [sic] the parents reproved them for it as something not quite proper, yet they did not stop them, but the boys had to dress themselves in women's clothes, live among the women, take their work upon themselves, and in everything present themselves as women, and this was so general in old times that almost every man kept a male in addition to his wife, with which the women were very well satisfied, and lived and dealt with them in the friendliest manner. The Russians call them shupans, but the Itelmen around B. R. Kõich, around Nishna Koiachshish. This ravishing of boys lasted until the baptism of this nation, the shupans occupied themselves, especially when the Cossacks arrived, mending with their clothes, undressing them and doing them all kinds of services before they could be distinguished from the real women. During my stay on Kamchatka, I still found many of these unchaste and unnatural persons from time to time. [pp. 350-1]

Iwan Bloch, M.D. (1872-1922) was a German sexologist whose Anthropological Studies on the Strange Sexual Practices of All Races and All Ages was posthumously published in English by the Anthropological Press in New York: in 1933. His book was obviously not a primary source and he did not say what his source was for what follows, but it may still be of limited interest. After citing the preceding passage by Steller, he wrote:

The reader will readily recognise the great similarity of the conditions described here with those in classical antiquity (intercourse with wife as well as with boys). At the same time clarifying light is cast upon the origin of these sexual aberrations. The counterpart of the “podex laevis” (Juvenal, Sat. II, v. 12) is the hauellakumach (that is, “a smooth --- which is always ready for sodomy”) of the Itelms; hence the similarity of the purely physical expression can also be inferred. [pp. 51-2]

Editor’s Comment

It has been widely observed that everywhere before the eighteenth century (and in most places before the twentieth century), homosexuality was practised in only one of two distinct forms: either (and most commonly) Greek love, or sex between (otherwise heterosexual) men in the active role and “third gender” transsexual males. The latter did not preclude sex between men and boys, since the passive males usually became third gender before puberty. Nevertheless, accounts of it are generally silent as to whether the third gender continued to play this role sexually in middle age. In the foregoing account of the Itelmens, the mystery is deepened, since it is twice assumed that those enacting the third gender role were “boys”. If they really were always boys, what happened to them sexually or romantically once they became mature men?

The Chukchi

The Chukchi inhabit the Chukchi Plateau, the easternmost part of the Far East. Of all the people of Asia, they are the closest, racially as well as geographically, to the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and much more closely related still to the foregoing Itelmans. After several failed attempts to conquer or exterminate them, Russia made a peace treaty with them in 1778 according to which they became subjects of the Russian Empire, but exempt from paying tribute. Interference with their way of life did not, however, begin until after the Russian Revolution, so, at the time of the writing presented here, they were still self-governing and culturally independent. In the author’s words, “They have preserved their nationality far more than any other race in Northern Asia.”

Baron Ferdinand Friedrich Georg Ludwig von Wrangel (1796-1870) was a Russian navigator of noble German descent. As a young Lieutenant in the Russian navy, he commanded the Kolymskaya expedition, which explored the Russian polar seas from 1820 to 1824. An account of his observations during it was published as Reise längs der Nordküste von Sibirien und auf dem Eismeere in den Jahren 1820-1824 in two volumes in Berlin in 1839.

Finally, I must mention a phenomenon that was most striking to us among these unrefined natural people. Pederasty is something common among the Chukchi and is not in the least hidden or kept secret. There are young, well-brought-up boys here who give themselves up to the satisfaction of these unnatural lusts. They adorn themselves with all kinds of female ornaments, glass beads, etc. They joke and coquet with their admirers as a girl does with her fiancé in Europe. It is unbelievable that these unnatural vices could arise among natural people, where there is no lack of women and marriage is entered into and annulled without any difficulties. [II 227]

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